Flower and Garden Show, Home Edition

 This week is the Northwest Flower & Garden Show in Seattle. For five days, the downtown convention center gets turned into a fantasy land of gobsmacking display gardens, complete with charming pathways and garden features and piles upon piles of blooming flowers. Primroses by the hundreds, stands of daffodils, tulips, hellebore, budding trees, mosses: it's pretty amazing the first time you go. I was utterly enchanted on my initial visit many many years ago. I've been a few times since and, sadly, you never get that full "Oh my god, I'm in Oz" experience again--or at least I never have. But it's a good place to buy stuff, too: I love what I call my Idaho tool that I bought at the show several years ago--alas, I can't find the name of the vendor now or I'd share. [[UPDATED because of course I can find the name by looking at the beloved tool; it's HoeDag.]] I think Noel came from the flower & garden show, as have any number of other fine things.

The Idaho Tool after several years of use and abuse

  But I'm not going to the show this year. As I say, it becomes less striking after you've been a few times, and spending time in a packed convention center just doesn't hold a lot of appeal these days. Instead, before I started working this morning, I took a few minutes to wander around here to be amazed, gobsmacked, and entranced by the local show in the backyard. Photos were taken. Photos are shared, in no particular order:

The green hellebore that was here when we moved in; it has since spread to cracks in the patio, though this is the original, mother plant.

The abstract entry of the photos: an old birdhouse that has been slowly deconstucting over the years.

Extra large, because it features Noel and the snowdrops leading to Gradka's step

The Lenten roses we planted a few years ago: they're the first to bloom each year and are thriving.

Sadly, the metal arches over this bench completely disappear in this shot,

 but I assure you that it is quite charming and will be all the more amazing once the clematis and honeysuckle get going.*

 

 

And, cheating a little by adding in a photo from a few days ago, when the ground was covered in the previous night's hail:

The icy morning birdbath

*absolutely no idea why the captions formatting is so weird or what to do about it.